4. S. Everingham and P. Rydell, Modeling the Demand for Cocaine (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1994).
5. Based on data from New York City in 1988. Out of a total of 414 murders, 218 were described as drug-related. P. J. Goldstein, H. H. Brownstein, P. J. Ryan and P. A. Bellucci, ‘Crack and Homicide in New York City: A Case Study in the Epidemiology of Violence’, in Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine (eds), Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 113–30. Also J. Miron and J. Zwiebel, ‘The Economic Case Against Drug Prohibition’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995, p. 179.
6. Quotes from Traffic can be viewed at the Internet Movie Database;
7. Saxe et al., ‘The Visibility of Illicit Drugs: Implications for Community-Based Drug Control Strategies’, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 91, No. 12, December 2001.
8. National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), June 2007).
9. Schmoke, ‘Forging a New Consensus in the War on Drugs: Is It Possible?’
10. Center for Disease Control, ‘Youth Risk Behaviour Survey’, quoted in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 49, No. SS-5, p. 66.
11. 0.3 per cent of whites, 1.6 per cent of blacks, and 0.6 per cent of Hispanics reported having used crack in the past month. These figures are cited in the documentary Letter to the President, directed by Thomas Gibson, QD3 Entertainment, 2005.
12. Philip Guy, ‘Race and the Drug Problem: More than Just an Enforcement Issue’ available online at
13. Marie Woolf, ‘Tory contender calls for more liberal drug laws’, Independent, 7 September 2005.
14. Available online at
15. IRC on VirginNet, 12 November 1997.
16. BBC News, 9 July 2001; available online at
17. El Tiempo, 7 March 2006.
18. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotráfico en Colombia, pp. 51–2.
19. RCN Colombian radio programme, August 2002, directed by Juan Gozain.
20. ‘Rio governor says legalize drugs to fight crime’, Reuters, 2 March 2007.
21. ‘El Siglo XXI será el siglo de la legalización’, Cambio magazine, Issue 408, April 2001, p. 28.
22. David Fickling, ‘US asks Mexico to reconsider “stupid” drug law’, Guardian, 4 May 2006.
23. John Rice, Associated Press, 19 March 2001. A slightly different translation of some of this quote (from the original Spanish article in the newspaper Unomasuno, 7 March 2001) appeared in the Village Voice (‘Dream of a Worldwide Truce’, 5 June 2001).
24. Beckley Foundation/Drugscope, Assessing Drug Policy Principles and Practice, p. 14.
25. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotrafico en Colombia, p. 132.
26. Peter Cohen, ‘The drug prohibition church and the adventure of reformation’, International Journal of Drug Policy, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April 2003, pp. 213–15.
27. House Government Reform Committee hearing on ‘How We Can Improve Plan Colombia’, 12 December 2002, cited in Sojourners magazine, May 2003, p. 23.
28. Mark Kleiman, Against Excess (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 307.
29. Dennis, ‘The Economics of Legalizing Drugs’.
30. Home Office, Drugs in Deprived Neighbourhoods.
31. A. Walker, C. Kershaw and S. Nicholas, Crime in England and Wales 2005/6, Home Office Statistical Publication 12/6 (London: Home Office, 2006), cited in United Kingdom Drug Situation, Annual Report to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 2006.
32. Home Office, Drugs in Deprived Neighbourhoods.
33. France Drug Situation 2000, Report to the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Addiction by the Reitox National Focal Point of France, l’Observatoire français des drogues et des toxicomanies (OFDT) (Paris, France: OFDT and EMCDDA, December 2000), p. 18.
34. ‘Fear of Drugs’, a translation from the Dutch by Mario Lap of DrugText of an article by Dr Erik van Ree called ‘Angst voor Drugs’, published in Vrij Nederland, 18 May 1996.
35. The Wall Street Journal interactive edition, 8 December 1999.
36. James Whittaker, ‘Let’s Talk about a Revolution’, Bermuda Sun, December 2005.
37. L. D. Johnston, P. M. O’Malley, J. G. Bachman, J. E. Schulenberg, Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use (Bethesda, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2004).
38. Miron and Zwiebel, ‘The Economic Case Against Drug Prohibition’, p. 176.
39. Niskanen, Economists and Drug Policy, p. 244.
40. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse II: Teens and their Parents, New York, 1996, p. 2.
41. Guardian, 7 February 2008.
42. These figures are from Abt Associates, What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs 1988–1998 (Washington, DC: ONDCP, Dec. 2000), p. 61. The data on prescription drugs is from the International Narcotics Control Board annual report 2006, p. 46.
43. International Narcotics Control Board annual report 2006, p. 49, citing National Survey on Drug Use and Health in the United States data. Between 2002 and 2005, OxyContin abuse increased by almost 40 per cent among students in their final year of secondary school to an annual prevalence rate of more than 5 per cent. In 2005, 7 per cent of college students abused Hydrocodone.
44. Denis Campbell, ‘GPs have got Britain hooked on painkillers’, Observer, 10 February 2008.
45. Available online at
46. D. Nutt, L. A. King, W. Salisbury, C. Blakemore, ‘Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse’, Lancet, Vol. 369, 24 March 2007.
47. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotrafico en Colombia, p. 125.
48. Various sources, cited in ‘A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada: Health Officers Council of British Columbia’, Victoria, British Columbia, October 2005, p. 7.
49. ‘Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse’, Lancet.
50. Dennis, ‘The Economics of Legalizing Drugs’.
51. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Statistics Source Book 1998, p. 218, citing statistics from 1990.
52. Cited in Salazar, Drogas y Narcotráfico en Colombia, p. 136, my translation.
53. Marvin Lowenthal (ed.), The Autobiography of Michel De Montaigne: Comprising the Life of the Wisest Man of His Times: His Childhood, Youth, and Prime; His Adventures in Love and Court, and in Office, War…, (Jaffrey, New Hampshire: Nonpareil Books, 1999), p. 28.
54. ‘Freedom is about Authority: Excerpts from Giuliani Speech on Crime’, New York Times, 20 March, 1994.
55. Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, p. 244.
11. Prospects
1. It is worth mentioning that like cocaine, Coca-Cola has been sullied by association with Colombian paramilitaries. In both cases, the context in which the product is manufactured is more at fault than any quality intrinsic to either product.
2. Calvani, La Coca: pasado y presente, mitos y realidades, p. 47.
3. Jamaica Gleaner, 21 March 2007.
4. Sandro Calvani cites a letter written by four doctors and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association purporting to demonstrate the effectiveness of coca as a substitute for cocaine (JAMA, No. 1, January 1986), cited in La Coca: pasado y presente, mitos y realidades, p. 20.
5. From an interview with Anthony Henman, August 2007.
6. Luis Carlos Restrepo, ‘El Siglo XXI será el siglo de la legalización’, Cambio magazine, Issue 408, April 2001, p. 26. Luis Carlos Restrepo is currently Colombia’s High Commissioner for
Peace, and played a key role in negotiations with the AUC paramilitaries that led to their demobilization in 2006–7.
7. Cited in Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: the War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, p. 202.
8. Gabriel Sayegh, ‘Justice Reform should begin with drug laws’, Albany Times Union, 22 August 2007.
9. ‘Our Most Important Legislation Ever’, Drug Policy Alliance email newsletter, 14 March 2008; ‘Prop. 5 Falls to Prison Guards’ Millions’, Drug Policy Alliance email newsletter, 5 November 2008.
10. Tukka Tammi, ‘Medicalizing Prohibition: Harm Reduction in Finnish and European Drug Policy’, PhD dissertation; available at
11. For more on this, see Alex Stevens and Kaitlin Hughes, ‘The Effects of Decriminalization of Drug Use in Portugal’, Beckley Foundation, December 2007.
12. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (London: Allen Lane, 2008).
Permissions and Acknowledgements
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, and the authors and publishers will gladly rectify in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
Chapter 5: Bounty Killer, ‘Down in the Ghetto’ © Greensleeves Records, Courtesy of Greensleeves Records.
Chapter 6: Los Tucanes de Tijuana, ‘Mis Tres Animales’, from ‘El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the US—Mexico Border’, by Mark Cameron Edberg, translation © University of Texas Press 2004.
Chapter 6: ‘Corrido de los Bootleggers’, from ‘El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the US—Mexico Border’, by Mark Cameron Edberg, translation © University of Texas Press 2004.
Chapter 6: Los Norteños de Ojinaga, ‘Los Tres de la Sierra’, from ‘El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the US—Mexico Border’, by Mark Cameron Edberg, translation © University of Texas Press 2004.
Chapter 6: Los Tigres del Norte, ‘El Tarasco’, from ‘El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the US—Mexico Border’, by Mark Cameron Edberg, translation © University of Texas Press 2004.
Chapter 10: Traffic: NBC Universal © 2000.
Chapter 10: Layer Cake: © 2004 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., All Rights Reserved, Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Tom Feiling spent ten years struggling to make documentaries for television. Exasperated by the declining fortunes of the genre, he went to Colombia in 2001, hoping to learn Spanish and open a hotel. Realizing that he had neither the money nor the stomach for the Colombian hotel trade, he instead made a documentary, Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia, which went on to screen at film festivals around the world. He came back to London where he became Campaigns Director of Justice for Colombia, a TUC group that defends trade union rights of Colombians. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics. The Candy Machine is his first book.
1 ‘US drug czar calls for end to ‘war on drugs’’, Reuters, 5.6.09
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